ResearchVR Podcast

Jeff Powers, Cofounder of Occipital and Arcturus Industries joins Azad to discuss active depth cameras, Apple's LiDAR, and his vision of the future of consumer volumetric reconstructions.

Topics discussed:
- The market for depth cameras in 2014 for consumers, developers.
- Why they focused on mobile-first with the Structure sensor.
- Google's Tango project not being adopted.
- Building a developer friendly ecosystem for 3rd party companies.
- A general Perceptual layer in software that can take any input.
- The economies of scale with new and niche hardware.
- Did Tesla pick the right choice with cameras vs LIDAR?
- Building the Room View 3D with Valve
- Interesting applications of the Index's dual cameras.
- VR eating up AR's use cases in the short term.

Petr Legkov, Krzysztof Izdebski, and Azad Balabanian, the three cofounders of the podcast come back together to discuss the last four years of VR, the podcast, and their lives.

Topics discussed:
- Why/how the podcast started
- revisiting old arguments
- retrospection on VR industry over 4 years

Retrospective on:
- locomotion theories
- roomscale gaming not being the goal
- best value VR headset
- European tech glass ceiling
- focusing on learning

Jessica Outlaw, a culture & behavior researcher and Rebecca Hyman, a mental health therapist to discuss human culture in-and-out of VR, VR marketing demographics, as well as representation in media.

Topics discussed:
- Building non-violent cultures in VR
- VR's target demographics and identities
- The unreleased Intel VR HMD's marketing campaign
- The border between messing-around vs griefing/harassment
- Reddit's subreddit self moderation framework
- The basics of culture in a community

Cofounder and CEO of Sketchfab, Alban Denoyel joins Azad to talk about all things 3D on the web.

Topics discussed:
- Why sketchfab was created
- Why the large tech companies can't compete against Sketchfab's community
- The importance of having downloading/remixing functionality
- Why it’s difficult to be build both a community and a store
- What’s the point of 3D reality capture?

Leap Motion's open source Project North Star has been fascinating VR/AR enthusiasts for the last year, but due to the scarcity of sourcing the components, finding a fully built kit is quite rare. Noah Zerkin, based out of Shenzhen, China has been focusing on fabricating and building the necessary components to build kits. He joins the podcast to chat about the headset, its advantages, and the challenges of what goes into building one.

Video podcast: https://youtu.be/G010rKFJMyY

recorded in Feb 2019

The CEO and CTO of LIV, Dr. Doom and Ruu join us to talk about the past, present, and future of green screen Mixed Reality and livestreaming VR games.

Topics discussed:
- Origins of green screen Mixed Reality - how did it start?
- How is Mixed Reality being today and by whom?
- Discord and the importance of building a community for a product
- GameChanger API : Adding audience interactivity into a streamer's game
- Vtubers and avatar copyright laws
- The state of VR streaming on Twitch

Tom Emrich, Investor from Super Ventures joins Az to talk about the prevailing trends of AR in 2019.

Topics discussed:
- Focals by North Smartglasses
- XR vs. Spatial Computing
- cultural implications of all-day AR glasses
- AR Cloud is to AR as the Browser/Search Engines are for the early web
- visual personifications of AI assistants in AR (Siri, Alexa)
- AR for the world vs AR for your face
- Facebook Portal
- AR in cars (self driving or not)
- Current state of AR investments
- How to think about 5G from an AR perspective

Sponsored by HaptX, the leading solution for Haptic Feedback in Virtual Reality.

David Dicko, Co-Founder and CEO of Skylights joins us to talk about VR as an in-flight entertainment (IFE) option for premium international flights. We talk about the current solutions to IFE, the hardware challenges, as well as the business of a being a B2B2C company.

Topics discussed:
- Challenges of cutting weight and building HMD hardware
- How airlines make decisions about in-flight entertainment
- 90/10 passive vs active IFE media consumption by passengers
- Current IFE solutions and their costs

Sponsored by HaptX, the leading solution for Haptic Feedback in Virtual Reality.

Ben Lang, Co-Founder and executive editor of Road to VR joins us to talk about the early days of the VR industry, the founding of his publication, the what's right around the corner in the industry.

Topics discussed:
- Oculus Quest's target audience and place in current HMD landscape
- Minimum spec requirements for PC VR gen 2.0
- Is "perfect Virtual Reality" the bar we need to reach?
- Will Valve ever enter the all-in-one VR space?
- Magic Leap's target audience

Paul Reynolds, CEO and Co-Founder of Torch 3D, joins us to talk about their design tool called Torch, built to bridge the knowledge gap for designers with web/mobile backgrounds, and letting them dive into the world of Spatial Computing

Topics discussed:
- Current state of iterative design (or lack their of) in VR/AR
- AR input methods, which to focus on right now, and what to plan for
- The importance of posting examples and use cases of what can be done with AR

Jake Rubin, the CEO and cofounder of HaptX joins us to talk about the benefits and challenges of Haptic Feedback in VR.

Topics discussed:
- What are the different modalities of touch?
- What are the different ways of visual stimulus can trick your brain into feeling something different?
- Surviving in today's VR market and industry
- Using VR to control 100's of robots
- How far are we from full body VR suits?

Alexander Porter joins us to talk about DepthKit, a Volumetric Video Capture tools and Scatter, the company he cofounded.

Topics discussed:
- Starting from building an open sourced volumetric video creation tool
- Creating mobile Volcap tools for non engineers with small budgets
- How do IR Depth Cams work?

Key takeaways:
- The need for Volumetric live action capture is on the rise (because of new display tech; ie VR, AR, holographic displays)
- New Depth cameras are on the rise once again
- Big need for software that lets filmmakers use these sensors to make film and art without having a CS degree

VR Investor and developer Tipatat Chennavasin joins us to talk about how far we've come over the past 2.5 years of consumer VR.

Topics discussed:
- Jumping from development to venture capital
- Which businesses _need_ VC investment, and which don't
- How media hype overvalued VR companies

Key takeaways:
- Right now is the BEST time to be investing and developing in VR, with no real AAA competition, no overinflated hype, with a growing and hungry for content userbase.
- Plenty of business models than don't need venture capital to be successful
- You're better off prototyping AR apps in VR than on mobile AR today

Lucas Rizzotto joins us to talk about "Where Thoughts Go: Prologue" as an anonymous way of sharing and listening to people's intimate thoughts and emotions in VR.

Topics discussed:
- BoostVC and why living with other founders is helpful for young startups
- Social Networks with or without like/comment response systems
- Why anonymity is important
- How to handle bad behavior, trolls, and 4chan raids

Deb Mayers, a Researcher and Graduate student of Ancient Cultures and Computer Science joins us to talk about History, technology, and VR.

Topics Discussed:
- Documentation vs Preservation of History
- Technology's role in the interpretation of History
- Cultures as dynamic entities

Apologies for the audio quality for this episode. Sometimes impossible for windows to pick the right mic to record from.

OTOY's Head of Blockchain Kalin Stoyanchev joins the podcast to talk about how they plan to crowdsource people's dormant GPU's, and use them to complete rendering jobs (in exchange for some crypto).

Is this the only VR + Crypto idea that actually makes sense?

Topics discussed:
- Crowdsourced rendering
- Is decentralization that important?
- How does OTOY's current centralized rendering system work?

recorded: May 2018

Behavioral Scientist Jessica Outlaw is an outspoken Social Scientist in the field of VR User Experience Design. She recently published an Inductive Qualitative study with Beth Duckles, PhD about the experiences of "Millennial, tech-savvy women" in Social VR applications (Altspace, High Fidelity, Facebook Spaces, etc).

In this episode, we talk embodied cognition, implicit biases, gender differences in social behavior and navigation in an unfamiliar environment, as well as the questions the paper raises up about inclusivity and approachability in design.

Az and Petr are joined by Amy Lynn and Andrew Abedian from Survios to talk about their upcoming new game: Sprint Vector, a game ALL about running in VR.
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Movement and locomotion have always been a big topic of debate in VR, especially since many people are prone to motion sickness when the visuals don't match the state of their bodies, so in this episode, we dive into HOW Survios has managed to achieve what was once thought to be sacrilege: SPRINTING IN VR.

Petr and Az are joined by CEO and Cofounder of SculptrVR Nathan Rowe to talk at length about their BIGGEST update: 'Smooth' sculpting.

We talk about the Oculus Santa Cruz II, Valve endorsing low-persistence LCD displays, the Acer MR Headset Review, and Adobe Premiere Pro's latest VR editing update.

As for the main story, Nathan explains SculptrVR insane performances challenges of creating a world building tool with ability to scale the world by 10,000x!

Download SculptrVR on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/418520/SculptrVR/

First part was as usual dedicated to most impactful VR News that Azad and Petr discussed together with the Guests. And speaking of the guests:
"Change the way you feel" is the slogan behind the fresh start up TRIPP Inc. As they were recently in the headlines with a 4 Million investment round, we decided to invite Zachary Norman
(President & Co-Founder) and Nanea Reeves
(CEO & Co-Founder) to this episode. After the news section we talked about Mood Altering VR experiences and how the TRIPP Inc team is building one themselves.

And again we were hosting live from WITHIN Bigscreen. The Main topic this time was: Does Mobile AR Matter? Also Petr and Azad talked about:

- Petr using the Strider VR treadmill,
- New information about Nvidia's Varifocal lenses,
- And smelling in VR!

The live video recording can be found at our Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/ResearchVR/videos/493007451049763 .
Alternatively it can be found under our Twitter page: https://twitter.com/ResearchVRcast/status/896784940334891008 .

The ResearchVR Podcast is back! This time, hosting from WITHIN Bigscreen.
This week, Petr and Azad cover all the latest in VR Research from the SIGGRAPH conference.

The live video recording can be found at our Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/ResearchVR/videos/490122298004945/
Alternatively it can be found under our Twitter page:
https://twitter.com/ResearchVRcast/status/894242297356746752

VRgineers is a Prague-based VR Hardware Startup. We discussed their 5k VR Headset at CeBit2017 with Marek Polčák. He was looking for the transformative VR that would finally fulfill the promise laid out when virtual reality was introduced as a concept. Since nothing like what he envisioned existed, Marek decided to build his own VR equipment using his knowledge and tenacity. How tough was it to build it? What are the opportunities for such a standing out device? Those questions and more are answered in this episode.

Why would one use virtual reality in Hospitals? Computer Graphics was used since long time in Medicine to explain complex issues. Using virtual reality is just the next step, to be able to visualise the body that is an awesome 3d machine itself in virtual space. This is useful as so far everything was flat and fixed while the only way to experience a Body was to do an autopsy yourself. The Heart VR Project is an education experience showing various congenital heart defects. Unlike a heart attack, those defects are born with. The heart is a very complex structure so using VR is helping the doctors visualising a heart on the go - right in their head. Nurses, Doctors and Students - they all are able to learn faster and easier. Tune in for the great discussion to learn more about it!

Everybody says that user testing is important. But why? And why should you gather quantitative data? It is because of how strong embodied cognition is - a lot of decisions, troubles, and actions are perceived and processed on the unconscious level, meaning that users are often unable to report objectively on what worked and what didn't. More often quantitative user testing can only be achieved if the implantation of the tool is easy and quick to implement. This week, together with Robert Merki from CognitiveVR, we went one step further - we took a deep dive into 3D behavioral analytics.

Thomas Van Bouwel is a Belgian based VR developer and Architect. He is interested in VR for design collaboration & participation and is making an asymmetrical VR+PC game called Panoptic

Many of the VR projects in Architecture are focused on the final stages of design process, basically for selling a house to a client. Thomas sees the real potential in the early stages: when the main decisions need to be made. VR is so good for this, as it helps for non professionals to understand and grasp the concepts of architecture very intuitively. And this is what we talked mostly about.

Remember us ranting about the old CAVE systems? That we thought, it would be the past of VR? Well, we have, at least partially, been proven wrong! CAVEs and in particular companies providing those are apparently not dead at all! We had the chance to interview Wim Vandamme, who is a Black Belt Software Geek and is B.IMMERSED at BARCO. Take it with a grain of salt and judge yourself: Do CAVEs and “industrial grade” VR have a chance to compete or to coexist with morn state of the art VR we all know and love?

Today on the show we are having with us Kyle Monty and Martin Holly from of StrikerVR, and Mike Murdoc from of TriHelix, with whom we are discussing their amazing technologies: positional tracking of GearVR and Haptic Peripherals.

StrikerVR is the provider of modern VR haptic peripheral gun, which delivers feedback such as recoil, really strong hits

TriHelix partnered up with PhaseSpace, creator of tracking technology for big players such as NASA, Disney, or Boeing, to provide a high quality experience for modern VR.

They are all working together to connect PhaseSpace tracking technology, TriHelix SDK for VR, and controller with feedback from StrikerVR.

Hello and welcome to episode number 15 of ResearchVR podcast! Where we dig deep into Virtual Reality with Cognitive Science and Economic Research.

For those of you joining us for the first time, ResearchVR is a weekly podcast dedicated to breaking down years of Virtual Reality Research into a digestible form, and discussing the current economic trends of the industry around the world.

This time we take a slightly different approach: instead of having all three of your favorings VR podcasts host, today Azad is joined by Alexander Haque from Retinad to discuss Behavioural Analytics in VR.

VR should highly improve it more ecologically valid simulation in VR should provide better transferability of knowledge learned in VR due to cue dependency
Due to strong stimulation it also influences dreams that are considered a side effect of memory consolidation

If VR has those impacts, than a researcher and a serious game developer needs to know, at least partly how memory is working! Ecological validity is important for science! And effects you can achieve are important for any serious game!

For those of you joining us for the first time, ResearchVR is a weekly podcast dedicated to breaking down years of Virtual Reality Research into a digestible form, and discussing the current economic trends of the industry around the world.

In today’s episode: we’re discussing with **Geoffrey Skow** from **Fishbowl VR** what can we expect from the first wave of consumer VR content.

Fishbowl is on demand play testing and analytics platform for VR developers, with hundreds of developers registered as testers.

For those of you joining us for the first time, ResearchVR is a weekly podcast dedicated to breaking down years of Virtual Reality Research into a digestible form, and discussing the current economic trends of the industry around the world.

In today’s episode: We tackle Time Perception and Time Dilation. We discuss the the anecdotal evidence that everyone keeps hearing about, and dig deep into the research done on how we keep track of time.

For those of you joining us for the first time, ResearchVR is a weekly podcast dedicated to breaking down years of Virtual Reality Research into a digestible form, and discussing the current economic trends of the industry around the world. In today’s episode:

We tackle the new field of 3D User Interfaces and Interactions. We discuss the current UI trends that are arising, and where we see things going for interactions.

During our CeBit2016 stay Kris and Petr decided to catch down some freakishly cool VR guys and have a short podcast with them! We have recorded this episode both as a podcast and in 360 degree video you can find on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBzA0d7KZEo

We have been joined by Ivan Varko from http://www.vrfavs.com , by Gunnar Gertzen from http://www.locomotionvr.de/ and by André Weinhold from eachtick.com

For those of you joining us for the first time, ResearchVR is a weekly podcast dedicated to breaking down years of Virtual Reality Research into a digestible form, and discussing the current economic trends of the industry around the world. In today’s episode:

Today we’re talking one the most important features of Virtual Reality: Presence, how to define it, achieve, and never breaking it.

Homework: What application in VR would you want to have "low presence", to feel somewhat disconnected from the experience?

A glass ceiling is a metaphor for an unacknowledged barrier to advancement in a profession. You can see all the amazing opportunities above you, as the ceiling is transparent! Yet all the effort to break through ends rather pitying. On this show we discuss with Sean Whitmore who is a Senior Analyst at "Greenlight VR" and with NiMA Asghari who is the Founder of "Caspian Robotics" the glass ceiling in European virtual reality ecosystem. While Greenlight VR is is a company providing market intelligence for the global virtual reality economy but based in the USA, NiMA experienced the hustle with finding investment in Europe himself! Together we try to find the roots leading to the glass ceiling, the negative effects it creates but also the benefits.
And if you want hear more about analytics or insights into the user's experience in VR, join Greenlight VR at the 2016 Virtual Reality Analytics Web Summit on March 16th! Visit http://www.greenlightvr.com/events/2016-analytics-web-summit As ResearchVR will be in attendance, all listeners can receive 30% off tickets for the Web Summit using the code ResearchVR ! Enjoy!

Today, we're joined by Drone entrepreneur and researcher NiMa Asghari to talk about Drones, VR, and the intersection of the two. While Drones are currently rather off topic to VR, we found many intersections! Not only is the technology behind both partly very similar. Drone racing will be in high need of lag free video transmission. And to be fully immersed as a pilot a good HDM is rather beneficial. Nima had the chance to present his thoughts, share his experience and in the end of the episode we where playing the fortune teller by guessing how the future of drones,VR and AR might look like.

Topic Suggestions, Guest Invites, and all other all feedback are helpful! Feel free to contact us under researchvrcast@gmail.com*or via twitter https://twitter.com/ResearchVRcast

Azad Balabanian Twitter https://twitter.com/azadux
Petr Legkov Twitter https://twitter.com/razialo
Krzysztof Izdebski Twitter https://twitter.com/Izdebski_RodioR
Guest: NiMa Twitter https://twitter.com/insideNiMA

This week's episode is a first experiment with a heavy content - instead of free discussion based on recent news, we do a detailed research on a certain key topic for virtual reality - listeners get practical tips based on theories and studies, with examples and references.

This week we talk about **motion sickness**. Starting from bigger picture - *Adverse health problems in VR*, getting a quick glance at symptoms and continuing towards theory and practice.

If you missed something during podcast or want to get a reference or link, check further show notes - all and more is there.

All feedback is helpful! You did not like something? You want to correct us? Or you liked it so much you want to share it with us? Feel free to contact us under _**researchvrcast@gmail.com**_ or via twitter [@ResearchVRcast ](https://twitter.com/ResearchVRcast)!